Photo by JOSHUA HALLING BY TATIANA SWEDEK Irish indie sensation Soak, aka 19 year old singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson, has that shy, quirky boyish girl with a pixie haircut and delicate voice thing going on, but she’s more than a cute androgyne strumming a guitar. Best listened to in the dark on your bedroom floor with distant lightning periodically illuminating the room, her music explores the confusion of youth and her attempts to find a happy medium between mopey exaltations of adolescence and the scary vagaries of impending adulthood. She released her first EP at the ripe age of 15 and […]
EDITORIAL: The Revolving Outhouse Door Of D.C.
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Remember Gary Hart? How ’bout Donna Rice? I reckon if you were of voting age back in ’87, you probably do. If not, here’s a quick refresher. Gary was a married, really smart, good-looking, charismatic, two-term U.S. Senator from Colorado and making his second run at the Democrat Party’s Presidential nomination. Donna was a young, really, really smart (Magna Cum Laude/Phi Beta Kappa grad of the University of South Carolina), and really, really good-looking (Miss South Carolina). Well, as fate would have it and what with one thing leading to another and what with the media […]
Last Night Was The Night They Finally Drove ‘Ol Dixie Down…And All The Bells Were Ringing
NEW YORK TIMES: The Confederate battle flag that has flown at the South Carolina State House for more than 50 years will soon be gone after lawmakers capped a tension-filled session early on Thursday and voted to remove it from the grounds of the State Capitol. “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state,” Ms. Haley said in a statement after the vote, which she watched from her wing of offices just […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR When Amy Winehouse, the British musician who sang memorably about her refusal to go to rehab, died due to problems related to drugs, alcohol and bulimia in July 2011, she was nearly as famous for her personal struggles as she was for her music. Just 27, Winehouse had been tabloid fodder for years. “Amy sold newspapers. If she was on the cover of a tabloid, it sold more copies. If she was on a website, they got more hits,” film director Asif Kapadia tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. It was the dawning of the digital age, with […]
INCOMING: Natural Bourne Killers
Pretty badass movie poster by artist Jim Evans, aka T.A.Z. ( The Beastie Boys, The Wu Tang Clan, Rage Against The Machine, Pearl Jam, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Saw franchise) was unveiled at Comic Con for American Ultra, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, which, judging by the trailer, looks like The Manchurian Candidate meets The Big Lebowski. In theaters August 21st.
FROM THE VAULT: Touch Me I’m Dick
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mudhoney plays Union Transfer on Thursday with Pissed Jeans. To mark their impressive 27 years of service, I’ve dug deep into the archives to retrieve the article I wrote for the September 1998 issue of MAGNET about going on tour with Pearl Jam and Mudhoney for three days. The story was titled WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE, and, if memory serves, was a little more honest than the band and the label were expecting. It wouldn’t be the first time. Enjoy. __________ In the decade that’s passed since Mudhoney emerged as the Seattle beer barons of […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To A Special Advance Screening Of The New Amy Winehouse Documentary
Amy Winehouse was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. We all know the power and the grace of Back To Black and we all know about her harrowing decline and premature death. The new and rightfully acclaimed documentary Amy, which opens Friday at the Ritz, reveals the back story behind the music and the actual person behind the grotesque, strobe-flashed caricature the media depicted. The film makes the case that the very factors that fueled her bottomless ambition and stratospheric rise — the psychic wounds incurred in adolescence, the debilitating insecurity and self-loathing that triggered her bulimia and a […]
NEIL YOUNG: The Monsanto Years Of Our Lives
YAHOO NEWS: Last week, Neil Young released The Monsanto Years, an agribusiness-themed concept album and a unique collaboration with Willie Nelson’s sons, Lukas and Micah, alongside Lukas’s bandmates in Promise of the Real. Now Yahoo Music is proud to premiere the accompanying The Monsanto Years film, which documents the recording of the album’s nine tracks at converted movie theater Teatro in Oxnard, Calif. (Where Willie Nelson recorded 1998’s Teatro, with Daniel Lanois behind the board, arguably his last great album.) Young’s Rebel Content Tour with Promise of the Real kicked off Sunday, July 5. Each tour stop will not only […]
‘I Was A Troll On The White Dude-Bro Internets’
SALON: My libertarian ethos merged with my niche gaming forum persona at this point. On my gaming forum troll account, I posted increasingly paranoid and erratic threads about guns, bitcoins, silver and the impending economic collapse. They banned me. Fortunately, I achieved enough notoriety for a “famous” poster to invite me to a different forum — a digital Valhalla where all the people banned from that gaming forum got to live and troll once more. This happened a few weeks before my banishment. I logged into this forum. “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” fan art, everywhere, posted by […]
F-STOP: Being Fred Armisen
Photo by GENE SMIRNOV Our man Gene Smirnov just won a big deal award from The New York Chapter of the American Photographic Artists with this portrait of Fred Armisen for my May 2014 Magnet Magazine cover story, which goes like this… “Do you have Questlove’s cellphone number?” Beyonce’s drummer asks nobody in particular. She twists around from her perch in the front seat of a black Escalade that NBC has sent to ferry us from a downtown Manhattan rehearsal studio to the storied Art Deco tower of power that is 30 Rock, and looks around to her bandmates in […]
SIDEWALKING: Insane Clown Sausage
12 North Third st., 6:53 PM yesterday by MEGAN MATUZAK
INTRODUCING: The Don Lemon Watch
If you are one of those people who watch CNN you’re a better man than I, and that’s just not because I’m a woman. Somewhere along the way CNN went from 24/7 pre-Internet news ticker to non-stop eye roll-inducing exasperation factory. Much of the blame for that can be placed on the shoulders of Don Lemon, former Philly news talking head and currently Twitter’s favorite whipping boy, who plays Tweedle Dee to Wolfie Blitzer’s Tweedle Dumb. There he is tsk tsk-ing Ferguson protesters for the whiff of marijuana smoke in the air — even donning a gas mask, god forbid […]
WORTH REPEATING: An American Horror Story
HIGHLINE: Jamie, whose mother was addicted to crack cocaine, was adopted when she was 3. At high school, she fell in with a wayward crowd and started drinking and smoking weed. Since she didn’t always get along with her adoptive mom, she lived with a close family friend from her church whom she referred to as her sister. One fall day in 2011, they got into a bad fight over their living arrangements. The friend told police that Jamie threw a brick at her, hitting her in the chest, and then banged the brick so hard on the front […]